Cast your mind back to March 2020 and the first school Covid closures. This might not be a time that you particularly want to revisit. If it isn’t, that’s understandable. For many teachers and school leaders, it was a time of great stress, characterised by worrying about the progress and wellbeing of pupils while trying to balance remote teaching and managing bubble groups in school.

Now, let’s try a little thought experiment: imagine what this already difficult time would have been like if your school had not had the support of a single teaching assistant (TA).

TAs are an established part of the school landscape. They comprise 28 per cent of the school workforce in England and 35 per cent in primary settings.

They are the mortar in the brickwork of schools, holding things together in numerous and often unnoticed ways. The pandemic has only made this clearer.

Indeed, research conducted by me and my colleagues Gemma Moss, Sinéad Harmey and Alice Bradbury, at UCL Institute of Education - and funded by the support staff union, Unison - tells the story of just how pivotal TAs were in allowing schools to keep functioning, and to support pupils and families during lockdown.

Results from our large-scale survey of 9,055 TAs found that around half of them covered staff absences, or managed a class or bubble on their own.

Almost nine in 10 TAs were on site, enabling schools to stay open to vulnerable and key-worker children. All the while, they continued to provide bespoke support to individuals with special educational needs and disability (SEND), and deliver targeted interventions.

Meanwhile, out in the community, TAs shuttled between homes, delivering food parcels, dropping off resources to ensure that pupils without a device or internet access could carry on learning remotely, and checking in on families.

Yet, despite the obvious value that TAs have been adding to their schools - both during lockdown and in the aftermath - confusion persists over what TAs are actually for.

The lack of agreement and clarity about their specific purpose in the education machine means that teachers and school leaders often overlook and undervalue their contributions. It also leads to this vital part of the school system not being utilised in the most effective ways.

Thankfully, there is a solution. New research demonstrates how schools can change the role of the TA so that their full potential in classrooms is met.

That there are changes that need to be made to how TAs are deployed and viewed is clear. According to our survey, TAs feel undervalued. Despite their frontline role during Covid, our research found that many TAs felt they had been forgotten.

Referring to the doorstep “Clap for Heroes”, one TA told us: “Lots of people are thanking teachers and overlooking support staff.”

This sense of feeling underutilised and undervalued is not only a by-product of the pandemic, however.

Getting the best out of teaching assistants in schools

It has been fuelled by a long history of TAs being virtually invisible to policymakers. For instance, consider the government’s current drive to improve teacher training and professional development, through the introduction of the Early Career Framework and overhaul of the initial teacher training provision.

Where do TAs fit into this drive? Where is the comparable professional development and progression for them?

Previous attempts to upskill TAs can be described as patchy at best. In part, this has something to do with legitimate concerns that teacher unions and professional associations have about proposals that cast TAs as encroaching on the teacher’s role or diluting teaching.

But this is symptomatic of a broader issue: policymakers’ limited view of TAs as proxy teachers, particularly for pupils with SEND. The latest incarnation of this lack of imagination can be seen in Ofsted’s recent suggestion that TAs need subject-specific training in order to be useful in the classroom.

The impulse to deploy TAs as proxy teachers to support children who have the greatest difficulty in accessing learning is understandable but it has become problematic. Furthermore, there is no robust evidence that it improves academic attainment.

Findings from a large-scale 2009 study I worked on, called Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS), showed that using TAs as an informal instructional resource for pupils in most need - the so-called “Velcro” effect, where a TA is “attached” to specific pupils - not only undermined those pupils’ learning outcomes but also had the effect of separating them from the classroom and the teacher.

Why, after all these years, has so little changed? It’s time to stop trying to fit the square peg of the TA role into the round hole of teaching.

We need to rethink what we are asking TAs to contribute to the classroom and the training we provide for them, all the while keeping at the forefront of our minds what that might mean for the work that schools are currently doing around Covid recovery and the role that TAs play in that.

But what would a new approach to training and deploying TAs look like?

Taking turns

This is where our most recent research comes in. My colleagues and I set out to address this question back in 2014, through the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) initiative, which is now the subject of a new evaluation funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).

MITA is a school workforce improvement programme developed in response to the DISS project. Our small team primarily supports school leaders with deployment strategy but we also work with teachers and, of course, TAs. Schools receive training, guidance and materials to instigate a wholesale reform of their TA workforce, which, crucially, includes addressing teachers’ own dependency on TAs to teach pupils with SEND.

Central to our approach is repurposing the everyday opportunities TAs have for extended interaction with pupils. Instead of replacing the teacher in an instructional capacity, we recast them as scaffolding experts, supporting pupils to engage in learning and develop the skills to manage their own learning.

What does this look like in practice? One of the key areas of focus for us is improving how TAs use talk. This stems from findings from detailed analyses of classroom talk collected as part of the DISS project.

These analyses revealed how TAs’ interactions with pupils were characterised by “completion and correction”.

We found that TAs spoon-fed information, did not leave enough waiting time after asking a question, and sometimes took over by writing down answers for pupils.

Though well intentioned, these “talk habits” fostered dependency. There was no suggestion that TAs were at fault or doing a bad job. What we saw reflected in their talk practices was the cumulative consequence of longer-standing problems concerning ineffective deployment decisions, and inadequate preparation and training.

So, what should we be doing differently? The MITA approach involves training TAs to use an intuitive scaffolding framework to inform consistent and purposeful “talk turns”. It was designed specifically for TAs by my UCL colleague Paula Bosanquet, from her PhD research.

One of our MITA mantras, which distil our core principles, is that TAs should provide pupils with the least amount of help first. Using the scaffolding framework, TAs intervene first with general prompts, then specific clues and encouragement, before remodelling the task if the child is truly stuck. Correcting is a no-no.

The aim is to ensure that, every step of the way, the pupil retains responsibility for the learning and the doing, and has space in which to attempt tasks independently.

This approach is the inverse of “complete and correct” so, perhaps understandably, TAs can find reprogramming their practice hard at first. Remaining quiet, watching on as a child gives something a go on their own and witnessing their struggle - even failure - is tough when you’re used to intervening in order to avoid them struggling.

But allowing this space is integral to our way of thinking about learning and personal development. TAs use problem-solving strategies, which pupils gradually internalise and apply automatically.

It’s the build-up of this independence that underpins better learning. You cannot teach independence but you can provide small, safe opportunities in which pupils can experience it and be in full control of their learning. And TAs are key to taking this practice to scale.

Let’s dance

That’s the approach in a nutshell. Of course, professional development around interactions is only one part of creating this alternative role for TAs. Remember, the DISS project found that TAs were poorly deployed in classrooms and inadequately prepared for lessons. So the MITA project also provides training on better deployment and more collaboration between TA and teacher.

We encourage schools to act in line with another of our MITA mantras: deploy TAs in ways that supplement rather than replace the teacher. For example, how often during classwork do teachers zip around the room, ensuring pupils are on task and able to progress, while the TA stays at one table working with the children with the greatest need? Flip these roles so that pupils who are struggling to get the quality time they need with the teaching expert, while the TA roves the room and uses their scaffolding skills to help pupils help themselves.

TAs can also triage as they rove, identifying the next child who’s in most need of the teacher’s attention, and directing them the child’s way once they’re available.

We recommend that teachers and TAs clarify and codify their roles, setting out the ways in which TAs might contribute to various stages of a lesson: discussing what the TA will do at each stage, agreeing this and, crucially, writing it down for each party to refer to. Think of it as establishing a “dance routine”.

The new EEF evaluation set out to determine what difference this type of approach can make. To find out, it commissioned a randomised controlled trial of MITA involving 128 primary schools (see box, page 29).

The evaluation showed that across a small sample of randomly chosen schools, compared with a control group, participation in the programme changed TAs’ talk behaviours: they demonstrated much more prompting and far less correcting.

Teacher surveys reported that pupil independence improved and that TAs had a significant or mostly positive impact on this.

Furthermore, there was some evidence, from a sample of schools, of a positive impact in terms of pupil engagement.

Analyses of data collected from 2,338 pupils, using a validated measure of engagement with learning, found that those in MITA schools were more engaged than those in control schools. Promisingly, this effect was evident a year after TAs received the scaffolding training.

In more good news, the EEF evaluation indicates that teachers and TAs reported marked improvements in how they interacted with each other.

There was an increase in the proportion of teachers and TAs reporting that they had scheduled time each week for communication. (Having no meeting time is a real bugbear for TAs and teachers alike.) TAs reported that their confidence improved, too.

There was also some evidence of a change from what was found in the DISS project, where the tendency to deploy TAs as proxy teachers for lower-attaining pupils and those with SEND resulted in those pupils who most needed high-quality teacher input actually receiving the least input, as well as having fewer opportunities to work independently.

At one school that was involved in the trial, for example, TAs and teachers had created their “dance routines”.

Heather Lacey, headteacher of Shirley Manor Primary School in Bradford, says that each class team “knows what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, who they should be doing it with”.

TAs used the scaffolding framework confidently, too. “TAs allow the children to do things on their own before they intervene,” she explains. One of Lacey’s TAs describes their support as “like an elastic band”. A far cry from the Velcro model.

What about an effect on learning outcomes? Because the MITA approach is founded on the view that the most effective way to deploy TAs in the classroom is to support the development of pupils’ non-academic skills, our programme does not train TAs to teach curriculum areas.

However, our theory of change predicts that where schools make improvements to TAs’ practice and pupil engagement, there may be a positive knock-on effect on learning in the longer term.

To test for this, the EEF evaluation included a standardised reading assessment for pupils in Years 3 and 6.

There was no evidence that MITA had an impact on reading outcomes. However, this attempt to capture long-term impact on learning may have arrived prematurely, and further testing of this hypothesis is needed using longitudinal data.

Incremental build

Let’s consider what this new research adds to what is already known about effective TA deployment and what it means for post-pandemic education.

First, the findings from the EEF evaluation suggest that it’s possible to train and deploy TAs in ways that increase pupil engagement. That’s potentially significant for schools right now, as some relatively small tweaks to TAs’ practice are achievable, and potentially valuable, in the effort to get children refocused on learning and reconnected with classroom life after a turbulent 18 months.

Second, as we know, the pandemic has interrupted academic progress. Deploying trained TAs to deliver structured intervention programmes should be part of every school’s plan for supporting pupils who have fallen behind in numeracy and literacy.

The EEF has funded a number of other trials that evaluate the impact of TA-led interventions and many have returned positive results. If you want to deploy TAs to improve learning outcomes rapidly, there is consistent and compelling evidence that says this is the way to do it.

But for this to work, we need a perception shift. The starting point for this new blueprint is to acknowledge the teacher as the subject and pedagogical expert in the classroom, and to recognise that TAs’ skills and pupil outcomes are maximised when TAs support problem solving alongside the mainstream curriculum.

Empowering TAs in this way has the extra advantage of creating an authentic professional identity, giving their role definition - something distinct from, but complementary to, that of teachers.

Yes, TAs should be paid more, but we can also show them how much we value them by eradicating the historic ambiguity that has been the signature of their ineffective deployment and by providing the professional development opportunities to let them thrive.

From policymakers down, we need to stop thinking about our TA workforce as a versatile - but randomly deployed - Swiss Army knife and, instead, as a set of precision scalpels. “One of the main benefits [of the MITA approach],” says Lacey, “is that it’s enabled us to get teachers and TAs to properly understand how they can work together more productively. It’s changed the culture of the school and turned the accepted norms on their head.”

Like completing a jigsaw, that process of change is an incremental build, the value of which is only fully revealed once every piece is in the right place.

Rob Webster is an associate professor at UCL Institute of Education. Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants in Primary Schools and The Teaching Assistant’s Guide to Effective Interaction are out now, published by Routledge. For more information, visit maximisingtas.co.uk

This article originally appeared in the 24 September 2021 issue under the headline “A shift in support”